Third, "before it was quite safe to stigmatise
him more openly:" and other writers have
advocated the same theory.  But the arguments
upon this point have evidently been advanced
upon internal evidence only, and with no direct
proof.  My own convictions are that this was
not the case. I still cling to the assurance that
the subject is one of a real traditional murder,
enacted in the county of Norfolk. Is not the
ballad also styled, "The Norfolk Tragedy?"
and as a Norfolk man, can I allow my county
to be robbed of any of its cherished traditions,
or its feathered tribe of any of their glories?
The original tune was preserved by Susan: and
it came strangely to my ears when, on my first
witnessing a representation of "The Beggar's
Opera," Polly Peachem appropriated the
well-known air of my childhood, and even the first
words of the tragical ballad, "Now ponder well,
ye parents dear."

Old-fashioned nursery-maids seem to have
stored their memories as much with the ancient
tunes, as with the words of the old ballads. At
all events, my childhood's prima donna evidently
had done so; for in very few cases do I find
that the melodies she chanted to particular
ballads, vary in any material point from those
scored in Mr. Chappell's book. One remarkable
instance of her unconscious archæological
erudition in this particular I found in the tune to
which she invariably sang the ballad, to which
she gave the title, but not without a certain
degree of shame, and always with an appearance of
apology—not on account of its inaccuracy, but for
other obvious reasons—of "The Devil and Doctor
Faustus." The tune was certainly a most
lugubrious one, as may be proved by reference
to Mr. Chappell's scoring, and never one of my
favourites. But Susan invariably defended its
propriety, which as a child I questioned: and
she was right. For have I not since learned its
history from the erudite and accurate Mr. Chappell?
How this melancholy tune was originally
called "Fortune's my foe," and was enormously
popular in the time of Elizabeth, being alluded
to by Shakespeare in "The Merry Wives of
Windsor," and by almost all the dramatists of
the age in various plays—how it afterwards
obtained the designation of the "hanging tune"
(some instinct must have told me this, to account
for my antipathy to it in my childhood) inasmuch
as "the metrical lamentations of extraordinary
criminals" were chanted to this air on
their going to execution, and continued to be
"for upwards of two hundred years"—and how,
eventually, the universal popularity of one
ballad adapted to this tune, "The Life and
Death of Doctor Faustus, the Great Congurer,"
threatened to absorb the original title, and to
give to the "hanging tune" that of "The air of
Doctor Faustus." Susan was right. But she
could not tell me, as Mr. Chappell afterwards
did, that most of the lamentable ballads of the
time were set to this tune, and among others,
the old ballad of "Titus Andronicus," upon which
Shakespeare founded his (contested) play of the
same name. But, after all, what did the tune
much matter to me, when "The Devil and Doctor
Faustus," although rarely sung to me, and not
without much pressing, on account of the
equivocal nature of the subject, conjured up to
my childish mind scenes of an awful splendour
and thrilling vividness, which "the great
congurer" himself, with all his magic power,
could not have outdone?

No less to my surprise did I find that one
of my great favourites once upon a time, the
"Blind Beggar's Daughter of Bethnal Green,"
was a ballad of much respectable antiquity. To
be sure, I may have had some inkling of the
matter, when the story was dramatised in my
own day, and, although not one of the successful
of Mr. Sheridan Knowles's plays, enjoyed a
certain popularity. Moreover, I certainly
learned from garrulous Mr. Pepys, in his Diary,
that this ballad was "an old song" in his days;
and he likewise had informed me that, when
dining at Sir William Ryder's at "Bednall"
Green, the very house was said to have been
built by the "Blind Beggar so much talked of
and sung in ballads," although some said "it
was only some outhouse of it." But it was
only later that I was convinced by official
archæological authority that "this popular old
ballad was written in the reign of Elizabeth, as
appears not only from the verse, where the arms
of England are called the 'Queene's Arms,' but
from its tune being quoted in other old pieces
written in her time."

I cannot afford to dwell upon "Death and
the Lady," twice mentioned by Goldsmith in
The Vicar of Wakefield; for, although one of
Susan's most cherished strains, she evidently
having a predilection in favour of the lugubrious,
it had never enough of the pictorial romance
about it to excite my boyish imagination and
thrill my heart, and was not, consequently,
among my pet ditties. Nor will I lay any store
by the "King and the Miller of Mansfield,"
about which latter quasi-historical romance
there was a tinge of coarseness, unpleasant to
my boyish sensibilities. I had little sympathy
with the miller, and less, I believe, with the
king, about whose identity I cared too little for
the personage to inquire; so that I was but
little moved by the information, afterwards
conveyed, that, although popular error attached
the personality of "bluff King Hal" to the
adventure in question, authentic black-letter
copies of the old ballad entitle it "King Henry
the Second, and the Miller of Mansfield."

In spite of my fondness, in the old ballads of
my childhood, for subjects that may be called
the "romantic-domestic," I admit there was
one, certainly of a not very refined description,
which was constantly given me "by special
desire," and was looked upon by me as an
excellent "concluding farce." This was a song
setting forth how "There was a bonny blade,"
who "married a country maid," because she
was "dumb, dumb, dumb," and who, when she
was cured of her infirmity by an officious doctor,
was so crushed by her overflow of tongue, that
he would have given "any kind of thing that